Apparently many were offended enough to stand up and… tweet… when Billy Crystal dusted off his Sammy Davis, Jr. impression at the Oscars last night. It was referred to as black face and mistrel show flashback and other such things in various blog entries and tweets. Hollywood Reporter article.
I remember when it was a standard part of his SNL days, and IIRC he even performed it with Sammy Davis, Jr., back in the 1980s (along with Muhammad Ali). He’s even done it at the Oscars before (when he impersonated Sammy D. interspliced with the “do you wanna go to a real party?” scene of Titanic). Personally it didn’t even occur to me to consider it racist, though I did think:
Man, he’s gotten a lot fuller in the face since the last time he did Sammy.
I wonder if Justin Bieber has any clue who Sammy Davis, Jr., was. (He died before Bieber was born.)
Was Neil Patrick Harris unavailable or too expensive?
At least he’s not doing “ancient Jewish guy stock character 7” (which of course he later did)
And this from somebody who’s still p.o.d at Crystal’s portrayal of homosexuals in SOAP. (I dont’ have a beef with Crystal- he was an actor looking for a break and it was a paying gig- and I liked the show itself- but it was a nadir for gay visibility on TV to conflate them with transvestites and transsexuals and then show that they can become straight if they really want to.)
So, do you think it was racist? Poll or comment, whichevah, you’re old enough to choose…
A Sammy impression is a Sammy impression. It’s not an impression of “Black People”. The make-up is just make-up for the part- “Black Face” is about more than just the make-up. Nothing black face or minstrel about it, baby.
Billy has been doing Sammy for over thirty years. IIRC their was even a moment on Sat Night Live when he and Sammy appeared together. I wouldn’t swear to my memory because Sammy guested on so much stuff its hard to recall for sure.
He made a valiant, though failed, attempt to make himself look like Davis. He didn’t have googly eyes, a big white patch around his mouth. He did an impression of Davis’s voice and mannerisms (I assume, I actually can’t remember ever seeing Crystal’s Sammy Davis jr impression).
Not blackface, though I’m shocked nobody involved in the whole thing ever stopped and thought ‘this is a terrible idea, because it is going to be misinterpreted’. Only slightly less so if they did, but they never convinced everyone else.
It wasn’t offensive to me, I got that he was doing a specific impression he had in his bag of tricks for years. It was better when he was younger and could break dance, but even then, it wasn’t very entertaining, just another impression. It was not entertaining for this audience.
I don’t think every actor in black face is offensive. Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder did a great send up of arrogant actors using blackface that was on balance a lot funnier than it was offensive because of the attitudes it mocked.
Sammy impersonation didn’t offend me, though I did think it (and many of the skits/set-ups) was pretty lame because Sammy’s been dead for so long.
What I did think was somewhat offensive was his comment that he wanted to get a black person’s perspective after viewing “The Help,” but he was in Beverly Hills and there weren’t any around.
Now, that may have been true 25 years ago, but surely there are affluent blacks that live in Beverly Hills today. No?
